To the UK first, where Tim Yeo, chairman of the parliamentary Energy and Climate Change Committee, has embraced free-thinking, rational scepticism and has abandoned dogmatic and quasi-religious alarmism, in a shift which will send shock waves through the climate community.

As the Telegraph reports, in 2009 Yeo said this:

“The dying gasps of the deniers will be put to bed. In five years time, no one will argue about a man-made contribution to climate change.”

We didn’t need to wait five years for that, since Yeo has now finally acknowledged the uncertainties himself:

Humans may not be responsible for global warming, according to Tim Yeo, the MP who oversees government policy on climate change.

The chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change committee said he accepts the earth’s temperature is increasing but said “natural phases” may be to blame.

Such a suggestion sits at odds with the scientific consensus. One recent survey of 12,000 academic papers on climate change found 97 per cent agree human activities are causing the planet to warm [that’s John Cook’s crock on consensus, by the way. What has consensus got to do with it anyway? If more people think the Sun goes round the Earth, does that somehow make it true? “8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas”… – Ed].

Mr Yeo, an environment minister under John Major, is one of the Conservative Party’s strongest advocates of radical action to cut carbon emissions. His comments are significant as he was one of the first senior figures to urge the party to take the issue of environmental change seriously.

He insisted such action is “prudent” given the threat climate change poses to living standards worldwide. But, he said, human action is merely a “possible cause”.

Asked on Tuesday night whether it was better to take action to mitigate the effects of climate change than to prevent it in the first place, he said: “The first thing to say is it does not represent any threat to the survival of the planet. None at all. The planet has survived much bigger changes than any climate change that is happening now.

He went on: “Although I think the evidence that the climate is changing is now overwhelming, the causes are not absolutely clear. There could be natural causes, natural phases that are taking place.” (source)

Still in the UK, the Met Office has been forced, by a climate system that simply wouldn’t comply with the wishes of the alarmist “consensus”, to admit that the past 140 years of modest temperature rises are statistically insignificant, after six questions were raised in the House of Lords:

The issue here is the claim that “the temperature rise since about 1880 is statistically significant”, which was made by the Met Office in response to the original Question (HL3050). The basis for that claim has now been effectively acknowledged to be untenable. Possibly there is some other basis for the claim, but that seems extremely implausible: the claim does not seem to have any valid basis.

Plainly, then, the Met Office should now publicly withdraw the claim. That is, the Met Office should admit that the warming shown by the global-temperature record since 1880 (or indeed 1850) might be reasonably attributed to natural random variation….

Lastly, it is not only the Met Office that has claimed that the increase in global temperatures is statistically significant: the IPCC has as well. Moreover, the IPCC used the same statistical model as the Met Office, in its most-recent Assessment Report (2007)…

To conclude, the primary basis for global-warming alarmism is unfounded. The Met Office has been making false claims about the significance of climatic changes to Parliament—as well as to the government, the media, and others — claims which have seriously affected both policies and opinions. When questioned about those claims in Parliament, the Met Office did everything feasible to avoid telling the truth. (h/t Bolta)

Finally, David Karoly, arch warmist of Melbourne University starts hedging bets as he has to admit that ludicrously scaremongering claims of 6 degrees of warming were “unlikely”, but given Karoly’s well-known ideological and activist stance on the subject, the press release makes sure that the bandwagon still rolls on:

Scientists from the University of Melbourne and Victoria University have generated what they say are more reliable projections of global warming estimates at 2100.

The paper, led by Dr Roger Bodman from Victoria University with Professors David Karoly and Peter Rayner from the University of Melbourne and published in Nature Climate Change today, found that [good news…] exceeding 6 degrees warming was now unlikely while [bad news…] exceeding 2 degrees is very likely for business-as-usual emissions…

This was achieved through a new method combining observations of carbon dioxide and global temperature variations with simple climate model simulations to project future global warming.

Dr Bodman said while continuing to narrow the range even further was possible, significant uncertainty in warming predictions would always remain due to the complexity of climate change drivers. “This study ultimately shows why waiting for certainty will fail as a strategy,” he said. “Some uncertainty will always remain, meaning that we need to manage the risks of warming with the knowledge we have.” (source – h/t WUWT)

Interesting times…

UPDATE: The headbangers over at Un-Skeptical Pseudo-Science (no link) respond to these developments with balanced and open-minded scientific curiosity… Nah, only joking! With yet more alarmism, this time from Kevin Trenberth, who, like most of the headbangers, must be worried he’ll be out of a job in a few years’ time, when “climate scientists” go the way of spear-makers, rag and bone men and gas lamp lighters:

Focusing on the wiggles and ignoring the bigger picture of unabated warming is foolhardy, but an approach promoted by climate change deniers. Global sea level keeps marching up at a rate of more than 30cm per century since 1992 (when global measurements via altimetry on satellites were made possible), and that is perhaps a better indicator that global warming continues unabated. Sea level rise comes from both the melting of land ice, thus adding more water to the ocean, plus the warming and thus expanding ocean itself.

Global warming is manifested in a number of ways, and there is a continuing radiative imbalance at the top of atmosphere. The current hiatus in surface warming is temporary, and global warming has not gone away.

CLIMATE Commissioner Tim Flannery’s work has been labelled “alarmist” by a world renowned climate scientist who says his own dire predictions were “wrong”.

Just six years after predicting climate change would kill billions by the end of this century, British scientist James Lovelock said warming was not happening at forecast rates.

“There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” Mr Lovelock, who still believes in climate change, told MSNBC.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time … it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising – carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that.”

In the interview from his home in Britain, the 92-year-old said Professor Flannery’s book The Weather Makers and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truthwere “alarmist”.

Professor Flannery has praised Mr Lovelock in the past, particularly his Gaia theory that the earth is a single and self regulating organism.

Has Tim Flannery been discredited with all the wet weather lately? Do you still believe in man-made climate change, or is it just like Y2K for the new millennium? Tell us below

“Within this century the concept of a strong Gaia will actually become physically manifest,” he told the ABC last year. In a review in The Monthlyof Mr Lovelock’s last book The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, Professor Flannery said his scientific credentials were “impeccable”.

The book, Professor Flannery said, had an “important message” that “in a few years, or a few decades at most, abrupt changes in Earth’s climate will begin, which will end up killing almost all of us”. A Climate Commission spokeswoman defended Professor Flannery’s work.

“The Weather Makers is an accurate and balanced work. It’s a critically acclaimed piece of work that inspires motivation to act, not fear,” she said.

“The most important message is that hope is not lost, we can still act to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”

Greens Leader Christine Milne said the climate was still warming.

“Every single year from 2001 on has been one of the 13 hottest years on record and the clear scientific evidence is that it is human activities driving temperatures ever higher … we can’t get complacent about what needs to be done,” she said.

Special Mention here for Australia’s part-time Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery. Employed by the Labor/Greens coalitions “Climate Commission” department. Their role to scare witless and alarm the voters of Australia about immediate dangers of Climate Change in order to defend & promote the absurd Carbon Tax, implemented in a deal between the Greens and Labor PM Julia Gillard, in order to secure her minority government after 2010 hung parliament.

“There Will Be No Carbon Tax Under The Government I Lead”

80% of Australian’s detest the tax, not only because it’s a bad tax, but becasue Julia Gillard campaigned in the 2010 election with her now infamous slogan “There will be no Carbon Tax under the Government I lead”, backed up by her deputy Wayne Swan “No it’s not possible that we’re bringing in the carbon tax, that is a hysterically inaccurate claim being made by the Coalition.” Weeks after securing power under alliance with the Greens, Gillard announced implementation of the Carbon Tax. Her personal polling plummeted to a record low of 28% and currently hovers around that.

Flannery predicted endless drought and in 2007 publicly announced, “Even the rain that falls won’t fill our dams” Australia’s East Coast reservoirs are now 80%+ full thanks to the return of solid rain 2008-2013. But no thanks to Flannery’s wild Alarmism the four eastern board states SA, VIC, NSW, QLD in 2007 began constructions of $12 BILLION dollars worth of desal plants, for each state, which are ALL currently mothballed. Built by socialist Labor ALP Governments pandering to the Greens vote & panicking about the threat of Climate Change and drought from information provided by the likes of Climate Commissar, eco-activist & mammalogist Tim Flannery. Like Australia has never had drought before? Blatant abuse of taxpayer resources in another green scheme gone horribly wrong!

Hot off the heels of the AP scandal involving the U.S. Department of Justice’s seizure of Associated Press phone records. AP slaps back with a fact checking exercise of State Secretary John Kerrie’s trip to ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia. http://apnews.myway.com/article/20130527/DA6HGEEO1.html

KERRY on climate change: “We’re below the Kyoto levels now.”

THE FACTS: The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which the Clinton administration signed but never won ratification for, called on the U.S. to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 6 percent from 1990 levels. Although a natural gas surge and economic woes have helped the U.S. lower emissions, they were still up some 9.5 percent from 1990 to 2011, the last year for which full data is available. Kerry also said the country met a target to cut emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. Government data shows about a 7 percent reduction from 2005 to 2011.

WHERE are those shameless nuclear hysterics who whipped up the Fukushima panic, now punctured by a United Nations report?

The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation last week found none of the Japanese public is likely to get sick from the 2011 incident, when a tsunami smashed into the Fukushima reactor.

“It is unlikely to be able to attribute any health effects in the future among the general public and the vast majority of workers,” UNSCEAR it said.

“No radiation-related deaths or acute effects have been observed among nearly 25,000 workers . . . It is unlikely that excess cases of thyroid cancer due to radiation exposure would be detectable.”

Yet remember the free ride the media gave to anti-nuclear alarmists such as Helen Caldicott, who warned Fukushima could make Japan “uninhabitable”?

She told 3AW the reactor could blow (ruled out by nuclear experts), which meant “hundreds of thousands of Japanese will be dying within two weeks”.

Then there was Crikey writer Guy Rundle panting: “Japanese crews (fighting a fire at the reactor) will slough their skin and muscles, and bleed out internally under the full glare of the world’s media.”

But the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl reactor should already have warned us to dismiss such scares.

That disaster was hyped by activists such as Peter Garrett, now a Gillard Government minister, who claimed it “caused the deaths of more than 30,000 people”.

The Australian Conservation Foundation published a paper claiming 250,000 died. Caldicott said it was “nearly a million”.

In fact, the best assessment comes from the Chernobyl Forum, representing Ukraine, Russia and Belarus and relevant UN agencies.

“Claims have been made that tens or even hundreds of thousands of persons have died as a result of the accident,” it said.

“These claims are highly exaggerated.”

It could find only 65 known deaths so far, nearly half from the blast, and said there was no “clear and convincing evidence for a radiation-induced increase in general population mortality”. There was only one exception: thyroid cancer in children, which killed 15. Thankfully, this is treatable.

Fear was more lethal. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimated up to 200,000 European women were made so scared they aborted their babies.